Information Dissemination
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists…
Joseph Ettor, IWW organizer (via anoncentral)
(Source: rethinksocialism, via anoncentral)
› Free-Trade Deal May Prove Greater Obstacle to Colombian Peace Than FARC | FPIF
[The] biggest threat to peace [in Colombia], paradoxically, could be the free trade agreement. The FARC’s continued relevance is due in large degree to their ability to recruit desperate rurally-based Colombians who have been shut out of the formal economy, and feed off the proceeds of Colombia’s comparative advantage in narcotics production. If critics of the free trade pact with the United States are correct, “1.8 million small-scale farmers would see their net agricultural income fall by over 16 percent on average, but 400,000 farmers dependent on crops that would compete with US products would lose 48 to 70 percent of their farm income…Undercutting their livelihoods would push farmers back into coca production, the raw material for cocaine” and flood FARC coffers (as well as those of their paramilitary counterparts to the north) with the profits from trafficked drugs to the United States and Europe. Flush with cash, and capitalizing on the sympathies of alienated farmers angered by the deleterious effects of free trade with Washington, the FARC could decide that power (and profit) lay in confronting the government, not working with it. At that point, all bets are off. [++]
Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, [estimates] that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages. These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributes about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Looting the Lives of the Poor | TomDispatch
Feeling stressed? Here’s some food for thought on a Friday afternoon: Americans now work an average 122 hours more per year than their Anglophone counterparts in Britain, and 378 hours more than the industrious Germans. That’s partly because we work more hours per week than anywhere else in the developed world. But it’s also a result of our weak labor laws. Every other country in the OECD has legal protections for weekends, paid annual leave and mandated days off for public holidays. And of course the United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave, along with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Enjoy the weekend!
› Chris Christie: "Do the Right Thing" and Reelect "Courageous" Scott Walker | Mother Jones
It’s not just the Republican Party’s biggest donors rallying behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the run-up to his June 5 recall election.
Christie and the labor unions do agree on one thing: a lot is at stake in Walker’s recall fight. A win for Walker would seem to validate his anti-union, deregulatory agenda; a loss would deal him a stunning rebuke, a rejection of the hard-line conservative policies peddled by Walker and fellow GOP governors including Christie, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, and Florida’s Rick Scott. From now until recall time, Christie said, “Wisconsin is going to be the center of the American political universe.”
I find it really rich that Limbaugh would consider union workers pampered and overpaid. This, coming from a mega-millionaire whose idea of “work” is to sit on his fat ass in his air-conditioned studio, spewing lies into a microphone for a few hours a day. No wonder Limbaugh pulls down hundreds of millions of dollars from anti-union corporate America. Memo to Limbaugh: you don’t have a f*cking clue as to what real work is. I’m talking about the sort of physically demanding work done every day by millions of ordinary blue collar union workers across America.
My Challenge To Rush Limbaugh: Why Don’t You Insult A Union Worker To His Face? (via azspot)
(via randomactsofchaos)
“The continuing growth of the wage gap between high and middle earners is the result of various laissez-faire policies (acts of omission as well as commission) including globalization, deregulation, privatization, eroded unionization, and weakened labor standards…The gap between the very highest earners — the top 1 percent — and all other earners, including other high earners, reflects the escalation of CEO and other managers’ compensation and the growth of compensation in the financial sector.”
— Larry Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute, speaking about the institute’s forthcoming study, “The State of Working America.”
TPM’s Brian Beutler looks the EPI’s new reflections on the status of the U.S. worker over the last several decades.
Just give the pesky workers easy credit at high interest. That’ll solve ALL the problems.
(via underthemountainbunker)
Today in news from the Incarceration Nation:
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide. Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system. More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.
Tens of thousands of Czechs on Saturday staged one of the biggest protests since the fall of communism, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption and calling for the end of a centre-right government already close to collapse.
Police estimated that 80-90,000 workers, students and pensioners snaked through the capital to rally in Wenceslas Square. Chanting and whistling, the crowd held banners proclaiming “Away with the government” and “Stop thieves”. Source
(via randomactsofchaos)
We talk about employment or staying home as a matter of choice, which obscures what it takes to make that choice: money and a mate. Do books praising the stay-home life ever suggest that if it’s really best for children, the government, which supposedly cares about their well-being, should make that possible for every family? The extraordinary hostility aimed at low-income and single mothers shows that what’s at issue is not children—who can thrive under many different arrangements as long as they have love, safety, respect, a reasonable standard of living. It’s women. Rich ones like Ann Romney are lauded for staying home. Poor ones need the ‘dignity of work’—ideally ‘from day one.’
Ann Romney, Working Woman? | Katha Pollitt
The U.S. agricultural exports are not so-called free trade but subsidized trade. Many of them receive federal agribusiness subsidies. They will flood Colombian markets, displace Colombian farmers, reduce Colombia’s food self reliance, and push farmers and farmworkers into the manufacturing labor market to further lower wages there. The trade deal is job killer for American workers and a wage depressor for Colombian workers.
Jill Stein: Obama’s Colombian Trade Deal ‘Race to Bottom’ | Corrente
› Trade Agreements that Increase Protectionism are not "Free-Trade" Agreements | Dean Baker
The Washington Post did the obligatory waste-a-word to increase inaccuracy routine when it referred to a “free-trade” agreement with Colombia in a front page news story. The agreement includes a number of provisions that increase the strength of patent and copyright protection in Colombia which will raise the price of drugs and other products above their free market level. This will have the effect of dampening growth, in addition to making health care more costly for people in Colombia.
There is no reason that the Post should call this pact a “free-trade” agreement. Its proponents like to embrace this term because it gives the pact a more favorable image, however it would be more accurate to simply call it a “trade” agreement.
In discussing this agreement, Morning Edition referred to the $1 billion in additional exports that the United States is projected to get as a result of the agreement. The number of jobs in the economy depends on net exports (exports minus imports). If jobs just depended only on exports, then we could increase employment by having car parts in the United States exported to Mexico to be assembled there, and then imported back as a finished car into the United States.
The history has been that the trade deficits have increased with countries with whom we have signed trade agreements. If that pattern holds with Colombia, the trade deal will be a net job loser, even if our exports increase. It would have been helpful if Morning Edition had clarified this arithmetic for listeners who might have been deceived by the way in which the Obama administration has sold the agreement.
It is also worth pointing out that an increase in exports of $1 billion would correspond to just 10,000 jobs, even if there is no increase in imports. If the economy is generating 200,000 jobs a month, this is equivalent to a day and half of job creation.
And now that they’ve conceded that mothers who stay at home to raise their children are, in fact, doing work, I assume the next step will be for GOP lawmakers to get right to work themselves rewriting the work requirements for TANF to acknowledge that, yes, “Moms Do Work,” and that therefore it’s redundant and wrong to tell the single mothers receiving TANF that this important and difficult and legitimate work doesn’t count.
slacktivist: Do Republicans realize they’ve just called for the repeal of welfare reform? (via azspot)
(via azspot)
There aren’t many stats that show how far workers have fallen in this country over the last few decades better than this one: Minimum-wage workers earned about 30 percent more in the 1960s than they do in 2012. The minimum wage peaked at $10.47 in inflation-adjusted terms in 1968, which is still higher than any minimum wage in the country. It’s worth noting that the unemployment rate was much lower back then too.
(Source: azspot)
In fact, they exceeded the minimum amount of signatures required by almost 400,000. Now, pending approval by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board tomorrow (a formality), the recall will be finalized and put into motion. The primaries for recall candidates will be held May 8th of this year, and the general is scheduled for June 5th.
Christ, it took them long enough. Keep drawing it out as long as you want, Scotty. You’re out.
